pork making their mouths wet with appetite; when the firecrackers began to pop outside their window, announcing the approach of midnight, he would walk his wife and children, all bundled up in brand-new down coats, to the city square, where his sons would launch their fireworks with boyish bravado and his daughter would scream with joy, her upturned face cupped in her mother's hands.
WHAT ON EARTH did she want? Han asked Kai later, in her mother's flat. His parents had forbidden him to see his wife, but he had threatened to withdraw his divorce application, and in the end, they had agreed that he could talk to her once. When Kai's mother had opened the door for him at dawn, he saw that she too had had a sleepless night, her eyes red and puffy.
“Please save her,” Kai's mother had said before she showed him to Kai's room. “Kai is a headstrong person. If something ever happens to her, you'll be the only one she can rely on.”
Han dared not meet the old woman's eyes.
“You have to help her,” she said. “Tell your parents that I will crawl to their door and beg for their mercy if that is what they want me to do.”
Han tried to comfort Kai's mother, but half a sentence later he choked on his own tears. The old woman handed him a handkerchief, and then turned away to wipe her eyes. They had been close ever since Han had come to her six years earlier, asking her to teach him to cook Kai's favorite dishes; together they had kept this secret from Han's parents.
Kai was in her sister's bedroom, where an extra bed had always been kept for Kai, even though she had already married Han when he arranged for the family to move into the new flat. When Kai and her mother had returned earlier that evening, they had found a note left by Lin, Kai's little sister. She was to spend a few days at her best friend's home, Lin wrote, and in the note she called Kai the last person she wanted to see now. Lin, at twenty-one, had just begun to enjoy being courted by the most suitable young men in town. Earlier in her life, she had taken up, from her mother, the shame of living in the alley, and made it a source of her own unhappiness. She was sixteen when Kai married Han, and at the time, Kai could see that the move made Lin blossom with confidence and joy.
Kai did not seem surprised when Han came in. She asked if he had seen Ming-Ming in his parents’ house.
“Ming-Ming is well,” Han said. He moved the only chair in the room next to where Kai was sitting, an arm's length between them. “He has grown a lot since I last saw him.”
“That's a child's job,” Kai said. “Growing. Isn't it?”
“He's a good baby,” Han said, and before he knew it, tears fell onto his lap and darkened his gray trousers.
When Han told her about the crackdown in Beijing, the news came more as a disappointment than a shock; Kai wondered if Jialin had heard similar reports on his transistor radio. She wished they were with each other tonight. She smiled when Han asked her what it was she had wanted that they didn't have. She had done what her conscience demanded, Kai said.
“What about Ming-Ming?” Han asked. “Has he ever been on your conscience?”
Not all women were meant to be good mothers, Kai said, and she apologized for the first time that day.
When Han sobbed, it was as though he were a small child again. He was, before anything else, his mother's son; despite her lack of feminine gentleness, his mother had always considered him the center of her life and had never failed to let him know that all she had achieved in her career had been done for him. Han had not known that a mother could discard her son so easily; such cruelty, beyond his understanding, crushed his universe. He thought of begging Kai, for the sake of his son and himself, but even before he opened his mouth he could see through his tears that, before she stood up and left, she was looking at him with pity and disgust. He cried, for his son and for himself, until his head dropped in exhaustion. In a half dream he remembered a spring day not long ago when he had become the first person in Muddy River to own a camera imported from Germany. He had been dating Kai for two months then, and he remembered looking through the viewfinder at her before he clicked the shutter.
A while later, Kai's mother entered with a look of panic and despair, and Han quickly wiped the corner of his mouth, his head aching dully. The police had just come and taken Kai away, she told Han. Please, could he help Kai, because he was the only one, now, who could save her.
RUMORS AND SPECULATION, born out of insufficient information and vivid imaginations, took hold in Muddy River on the morning after Ching Ming. People woke up to the seven o'clock news, read not by Kai but by a male colleague of hers. Two retired engineers, who took morning walks together, contemplated what could have happened. It might come down to a political earthquake now, they said to each other. Those who won the game would become kings, they said, citing the old saying, but neither ventured a guess about who would be the winners. The men had both escaped unscathed the various revolutions in their lifetimes. They had known each other for three years now, since meeting in the hospital morgue, two new widowers; in the twilight of their lives they found one another irreplaceable. They had discussed the situation on their daily walks in the past two weeks, each trusting the other as the only one with whom such sensitive matters could be voiced. Neither of them had any expectations, nor did they take a stand—at their age they considered the only role left for them to be theater spectators, and they took their seats and coolly watched from a distance. For every poor soul who was dragged down by this, the two wise men contemplated, there would be another one up for a promotion. A balance of the social energy, one said, and the other nodded and added that, indeed, to climb up in this country, you'd have to use someone else as a stepping stone. Neither bothered to take up his own past, as both understood that to be safe and sound in their age, they had had their share of bodies underneath their feet to keep them afloat, and those stories were no longer relevant, their shame and guilt absolved by old age.
Elsewhere, a woman commented to her husband at the breakfast table that the female announcer was in trouble. One could not tell merely from a changed schedule of her broadcast shifts, the husband argued, but the wife insisted that she herself had been the farsighted one; if not for her, he would have let himself be summoned by the woman's speech to the city square like a fool. The husband ate his dinner in silence, but this gesture was not enough to placate his wife, who, along with several of her close friends, despised the woman reading the news in her beautiful voice to their husbands, making them deaf to their wives’ domestic nagging. “I tell you,” she said now, her voice drowning out the announcer's report on the recordhigh revenue of the city of Muddy River for the first quarter. “I tell you, that woman is a nightmare for any man.”
In the emergency room of the city hospital, where no one was dying or being rushed in to die, a boy lay in the recovery room and his mother dozed by the bedside. The boy had taken part in a gang fight the night before and had his scalp cracked open by a brick. The doctor who had given him twenty-five stitches was off duty now, and her colleagues, two women who had both been at the rally the day before, stood by the window of the recovery room without talking. If it came to a crackdown, the one who had signed the petition thought to herself, she would divorce her husband so his promotion to head of hematology would not be affected; the other woman, more positive due to her optimistic nature in general as well as her decision not to sign the petition, believed that nothing serious would happen, because the law never punished the masses for going astray. No discussion occurred between the two colleagues, yet when they parted for their morning duties, one comforted the other with a pat on the shoulder, and all was understood.
